THE LAST AIRBENDER teaser trailer is now out… The only action I got out of this is muttering “Ang ain’t white” to myself. Other than that, this trailer’s a real yawner. I see more impressive martial arts from 1970s movies on TV during Sunday afternoons. Someone might say it’s just the teaser trailer and not a whole fight scene, but the teaser trailer is supposed to get me excited, right? And this really doesn’t. More »

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Masi Oka, of Heroes fame, is planning to produce a family-friendly movie based on mmorpgs (massively multiplayer online role-playing game). The story revolves around a group of teens that only know each other through the computer until something threatens the safety of the world and they have to meet up in the real world to save it. More »

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Pic’s released from new film Avatar, the Last Airbender directed by the king of twist endings M.Night Shyamalan. Being a big fan of the anime series I am a little disappointed by the casting of almost full Caucasian cast except for Dev Patel as Zuko, who in my opinion would have made a better Saka. I am hoping that M. Night redeems himself after his last few films and does not rely on his twist ending ideology to save this film. Here are a few pics released by the studio to start the hype. More »

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Gianna Jun, actress formerly known as Jeon Ji Hyeon (My Sassy Girl), will be making her English debut in Blood: The Last Vampire. The film is set to release June 26 in the UK, followed by July in the US. With the success of Korea’s *answer to Twilight, “Thirst” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and Twilight’s highly anticipated New Moon sequel, 2009 is quickly becoming the year of the vampire. Judging from the trailer, Blood: The Last Vampire’s is looking a lot like a Buffy/ Blade/Underworld-esque movie. In short Saya, the movie’s ferosh heroine is on a mission to kill…well you get it. Explosions, blood and cheesy lines happen somewhere in between. Czech out the trailer: More »

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Everyone knows that most Indian movie equals song and dance with some melodramatic crying thrown in between. Well, I am proud to say that once every few years someone has the balls to make a movie that does not rely on song, dance and elaborate badly choreographed fight sequences to make a entertaining piece of cinema. Two ex software engineers who made a movie called flavors a few years ago to accolades from festivals and the public alike finally decided to take the plunge into Bollywood to make their next film after 4 years of hitting the pavement and using up all their savings they finally got financing to make their next film called 99. More »

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BIG MAN JAPAN (Dai-nipponjin) opens in limited release in LA and NY this weekend. The movie was a crowd favorite when it premiered last summer as part of the NY Asian Film Festival and Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film. Magnolia Pictures is giving BIG MAN JAPAN a slow American rollout starting with the Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles and Cinema Village in New York City. Throughout May and June, BIG MAN JAPAN is supposed to roll out to other theaters across the US. More »

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Just caught a screening of “Martyrs” a french film starring, Morjana Alaoui and Mylène Jampanoï who is 50% chinese and 50% french and a 100% hottest woman ever. Unfortunately, she is married to Indian Supermodel actor Milind Soman who she met during the shooting of the film Valley of Flowers. Anyway, back to the film, this movie is not for the faint of heart. Some might categorize this as torture porn a-la Saw or Hostel but unlike Saw or Hostel this movie has substance. Having seen plenty of Japanese and Korean Horror and their freaky counterparts which are great in their own right and can leave you sometimes a little disturbed but nonetheless feeling like you just came out of a movie. More »

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Got your interest. Nothing perverted, this is just a new indie movie which is going to be released soon and I think if you guys have a chance to go check it out. I did see this movie at the LA Asian Film Festival last year and was pleasantly surprised at how good the movie was. It was well written and had a very effective cast. I am usually skeptical while watching an indie movie because independent directors usually only care about the lead and the supporting cast is usually ignored. In this case, the supporting cast is what made the movie, especially Gerry Bednob and Jalleel White who steal every scene they are in. More »

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“Paco and the Magical Book” will have its American premiere in New York City, Tuesday, April 7 as part of New York-Tokyo’s ANA Nippon Eiga Series. The screening is free with RSVP, but seating is limited. “Paco and the Magical Book” is directed by Tetsuya Nakashima whose credits include “Kamikaze Girls” and “Memories of Matsuko” (an absolute favorite of mine). More »

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Last night I went to the premiere midnight screening of Fast and Furious 4, and holy sh*t was it awesome. Let’s face it, the last two weren’t such a let down that I had completely given up on the franchise but with the new direction of director Justin Lin, this movie doesn’t fail to impress. More »

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Beloved Oscar-nominated actor for his role of Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, Pat Morita will have his final film Royal Kill released posthumously on April 10, 2009 at select AMC Theatres in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington DC surrounding areas. More »

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Quick Gun Murugan is finally having a premiere in LA at the Indian film festival on April 24th. If you haven’t heard about this or seen the trailer you are surely missing out on one of the funniest spoofs since Airplane or Scary Movie.

Quick Gun Murugan is a western spoof with attitude, featuring outlandish songs, outrageous melodrama and crazy action sequences including a classic duel in a traffic jam. More »

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I’ve watched a lot of things lately that I seriously regret watching. After Infinity Challenge’s coma inducing “EnerGee,” I thought nothing could top my disgust. Then came along Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. Having seen the terror Streetfighter movies have unleashed in the past, I braced myself for a beating on opening night. But this time, the only thing Streetfighter hurt was my feelings. More »

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If you were watching Super Bowl commercials, you wouldn’t have noticed that the upcoming G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra movie features an Asian cast member playing a leading, main male character role. How could you have missed it? South Korea’s Byung Hun Lee is “Storm Shadow” but is masked throughout the trailer. More »

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Went to see Kung Fu Panda last Friday. It was hilarious and I enjoyed it a lot. It’s a movie that both adults and kids will enjoy. There were infants and kids at the 10pm showing I attended and I had to wonder how responsible their parents were. Aren’t they supposed to be in bed by now!? Some kids even talked through the entire movie and I just wished their parents would ask them to shut the hell up keep their noise down. Anyway, this movie is to be released in Asia later this month and Korean pop sensation Rain has recorded the soundtrack for it. The song for the movie was no other than the cliche ”Kung Fu Fighting” song originally recorded by Carl Douglas. 

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Memorial Day marks the beginning of the big summer movie season, though in recent years, it seems as it’s been expanded to the beginning of May. (I’m looking forward to when Hollywood defines summer as starting in February.) I was reading the comments in one of our Social News thread and saw this insightful comment by Jekki, our resident insightful-ist,

It’s like a new Asian movie every week here! Before I would hardly ever hear about new Asian movies.

Then Phil, who’s easily our best Asian movie guru said,

There are tons of Asian movies being made…China and India are the two largest producers of feature-length films in the world (US is number 1).  Hope that the ones that make it to US theaters get great audience turnouts.  The more successful they are, the better chances are that more get distributed…

As you can plainly see, we have quite the intellectual stimulating conversation within the comments on this site. My curiosity was stimulated enough to make me want to go and figure out how many Asian or Asian related movie there are this summer. Below is the list that I found with my comments about the movie which you should probably ignore. It’s sorted by release date so for those that think there’s deeper meaning to my blog posts, don’t dwell too much on the order.

Stars: Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, John Goodman, Matthew Fox, Rain.

Directors: Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski

Plot: The story begins with Speed Racer who is a young man with natural racing instincts whose goal is to win The Crucible…

My Take: While the Wachowski brothers experiment into hyper-reality movie making advance American cinema nearly two centuries forward, I predict it will bomb in the box offices on how many seizure related deaths it caused. (Note: I actually wrote this three weeks ago, so the prediction is still valid.)

Stars: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Radha Mitchell, Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh

Directors: Roger Spottiswoode

Plot: About young British journalist, George Hogg, who with the assistance of a courageous Australian nurse, saves a group of orphaned children during the Japanese occupation of China in 1937.

My Take: While the title suggest otherwise, this is not a children’s flick. I’m down for any movie that has the legendary actors Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh.

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Due to its worldwide box office success, The Forbidden Kingdom is getting a sequel. This chop-suey of Chinese fable will reunite the two big Chinese martial arts stars, Jet Li and Jackie Chan, and will likely feature a romance between Jet Li and Li Bingbing‘s characters, according to the Beijing Times report. Wait, the romancing of the Monkey God and the Grey Haired Lady aka Moonlight Witch? Now that’s a first. A better storyline would be to have Jet Li play a mute guy. This is certainly fitting since he uttered no more than 10 sentences in the first movie, and most were incomprehensible. 

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Andy Lau, Maggie Q & Sammo Hung. A trio I would have never thought to see on the big screen together, join forces for director Daniel Lee’s (Black Mask) epic tale.

AP Photo: Kin Cheung

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I saw the lineup…especially with Maggie Q (Mission Impossible III, Live Free, Die Hard) thrown into the mix. I was quite anxious however to see Andy Lau’s (House of Flying Daggers) performance as well as Sammo Hung’s, mostly cause I hadn’t seen Sammo on screen in quite awhile.

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